I don't agree with the removal of the Remote Sensing proposal. The remote sensing community differs from the Geoscience one, it is a discipline in itself. Futhermore, as I see it, RS concerns more the tools and methods and Geoscience, the applications.
– DJackAug 29 '13 at 12:31

I do agree with @gerrit as it provides the data which is used in geosciences and a lot of question of geoscientists arose from the usage of GIS tools and remote sensing data...
– RiccardoAug 29 '13 at 12:38

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I'm with @DJack on this one. While geoscientists use remote sensing extensively, this isn't the only application for those tools. Remote sensing is also useful for land use planning, espionage, and various other applications that are not necessarily on-topic for this site. Questions about the use of RS for geoscience should certainly be on-topic here.
– Evan JohnsonAug 29 '13 at 14:39

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@EvanJohnson The topic currently reads Proposed Q&A site for remote sensing scientists and researchers. I acknowledge that land use planning, espionage, and other applications may be outside of the scope of geosciences, but as it reads now — scientists and researchers — it's a subset of geoscience, and most of the current example questions should be on-topic there. I'd be curious to see questions that fit the remote sensing proposal, but not the geoscience proposal. (Oh, and I doubt NRO employees are going to discuss their work on Stack Exchange <w>)
– gerritAug 29 '13 at 15:37

@gerrit It also says "the topic and audience are still being decided." So a good alternative to closing it may be to orient the RS site toward technical questions about RS technologies and techniques--things that anyone applying RS to their field might need to look up but which aren't unique to that field. "Scientists and researchers" is a broad term that includes more than just geoscientists.
– Evan JohnsonAug 30 '13 at 15:05

I think that SR is indispensable, because if you don't have information about the phenomenon you never may made an appropriate analysis because you don't have in mind all variables that could be relevant for any study, to sum up the database that you get from SR is information that you can't avoid.

I think it is not good to have RS in Geosciences. RS is a method to acquire data which can be used in oceanography, ecology, archeology, agriculture, architecture etc. Like GIS is a tool to analyze and manipulate geodata (including data obtained by RS), and all geosciences use GIS a lot. But GIS stackexchange is a separate site (and appeared long before Geosciences). So I think RS should be or a separate site or inside GIS where it is now. Not to mix tools and applications.

Many example questions on Geosciences are about tools. Satellite remote sensing is a major tool in atmospheric science, and entire journals, published by EGU, are dedicated to their use. Some questions I think of right now (not even from the example questions), are How are tree top heights retrieved, What is the IR split window technique, Are there any sub-visible atmospheric windows, How do I at 3.7µm split terrestrial from solar sources, are all remote sensing questions that should be welcome on Geoscience.
– gerritAug 30 '13 at 23:34

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@gerrit RS together with GIS, GPS and several other tools are called Geospatial Technologies, or Geomatics, or sometimes even Geoinformatics. They are all now included in GIS SE, because they are about geoinformation which can be used in geo- and other sciences. (Maybe GIS SE can be renamed to represent it better. Chat in GIS SE shows that they don't want to give away any question about acquiring georeferenced information :))
– nadyaSep 1 '13 at 3:24

On the chat of GIS.SE someone mentioned that in China, they have a term called "3S" which refers to (GIS, GPS, RS). Would it be better to have a site called 3S SE which including questions in GIS, GPS and RS?